Results of the Weathering Group Vala Ragnarsdottir

SoilCritZone Partnes Europe – Vala Ragnasdottir, Bristol UK - Co-ordinator – Nikos Nikolaidis, Chania, Greece – Steve (Barney) Banwart, Sheffield, UK – Jerome Gaillardet, Paris, France – Martin Novak, Prague, Czech Republic – Paulina van Gaans, Utrecht, Netherlands – Svetla Rousseva, Sofia, Bulgaria – Winfried Blum, Vienna, Austria – Par Aagard, Oslo, Norway USA – Susan Brantley and Tim White, PennState, USA

Resource depletion… We now are a geological force - move 10x more material per year than nature! In 30 years Have used up 1/3 of world’s resources 1/3 of our forests ¼ of our most productive soils … every year 24 billion tonnes are eroded off our land

Study of life-cycle of soils for sustainability Soil the most important resource after water With soils eroding faster than they are being formed - we are living unsustainably Earth habitants 6.7 billion and rising If we loose our soils, we will not be able to feed the Earth population

Ronald Wright (A Short History of Progress): empires that collapse show similar behaviour Stick to entrenched belief and practices, robbing the future to pay the present Spend the last reserves of natural capital on reckless binge of excessive wealth and glory … does this sound familiar????

Past civilization collapses Localized, e.g. the world’s first civilisation – the Sumer from Southern Mesopotamia, which is now Iraq – collapsed around 2000 BC as a result of soil degradation With 6.7 billion people and rising the collapse is more likely to be Global...

Problems arise when people loose sight of the “big picture” Is this you?

Soils: The final frontier?

H+H+ H+H+ H+H+ Organic acids Siderophores Intimate contact with minerals High-affinity selective ion uptake Tolerance of high acidity and Al 3 +ions The mycorrhiza weathering engine (After Landeweert et al., 2001) Nutrients Organic Carbon

Time for formation versus erosion Life cycle analysis of soil has been ignored – Soil science very fragmented Soil formation 50 to 1000 years for A and B horizons – In extreme conditions - 10,000 years – Agronomists quote 1 t/ha/yr – 7 mm/100 yrs – Slow! - of the order of <1-10 mm/100 yrs Soil erosion a major problem today – Fast! - of the order of mm/100 yrs – Considered to be as serious an environmental problem as global warming!

Our thought process but need to change to.. Linear Cyclic Cyclic

Weathering and soil formation Research questions – what parameters needed – How to determine dominant factors controlling chemical weathering and quantify them in a given environment and at various scales – How physical, chemical, and biological weathering processes are coupled, and how can these couplings can be elucidated and quantified – How to advance our ability to predict weathering processes over the range of pertinent spatial scales, including mineral surfaces, laboratory reactors, soil profiles, catchments, and global systems

Pedological and hydrological scales Lin et al. (2006)

And now for economic evaluation…